ABSTRACT
Two tenets of Plato’s teaching about the universe were that it was a living creature and man was a microcosm of it. He describes it thus in Timaeus:
… from such constituents, four in number, the body of the universe was brought into being, coming into concord by means of proportion …
And for shape he gave it that which is fitting and akin to its nature. For the living creature that was to embrace all living creatures within itself, the fitting shape would be the figure that comprehends in itself all the figures there are; accordingly, he turned its shape rounded and spherical; equidistant every way from the centre to extremity – a figure the most perfect and uniform of all …
Just as the sphere of the sensible universe embodies all living creatures, so the sphere of the intelligible universe and its four ‘constituents’, or elements, are conceptualized in terms of Plato’s abstract model, with four of the regular polyhedra being inscribed within the fifth, the dodecahedron and the closest to being a sphere (Fig. 3).2 Plato continues in almost comical terms. Partly because the human head is notionally spherical, man is a microcosm of the spherical universe, his body being no more than a service pod for keeping the head alive and active:
Copying the round shape of the universe, they confined the two divine revolutions in a spherical body – the head, as we now call it – which is the divinest part of us and lord over all the rest. To this the gods gave the whole body, when they had assembled it, for its service …
The interconnection between macrocosm and microcosm was elaborated by Maximus the Confessor, one of many who attest to its Christian acceptance:
… using a well-known image he submitted that the whole world, made up of visible and invisible things, is man and conversely that man made up of body and soul is a world. … as the soul is in the body so is the intelligible in the world of sense, that the sensible is sustained by the intelligible as the body is sustained by the soul …
The connection was equally accepted in the West and is typified by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the prolific writer, composer, dramatist, and visionary who, in one of her visions, sees many symmetries between the world and the body and soul. Parts of the macrocosm are shown to be in proportion with each other in a similar fashion to proportions found in the human microcosm. Hildegard demonstrates this by citing measurements, and she continues with a series of analogies, such as between the 4 elements and 4 humours, the 4 winds and the 4 limbs.5 Alan of Lille, also in the twelfth century, demonstrates the integrity of man with the universe by similar means when he has Nature, God’s appointee, declare:
I am the one who formed the nature of man according to the exemplar and likeness of the structure of the universe so that in him, as in a mirror of the universe itself, Nature’s lineaments might be there to see. For … the four elements unite the parts of the structure of the royal palace of the universe, so too … [the] diversity of four combinations bind together the house of the human body. Moreover, the same qualities that come between the elements as intermediaries establish a lasting peace between the four humours.
